The majority of youth in government foster care have experienced mental health issues, including depression, anxiety and other behavioural problems, studies show.

Despite this, they are cut off from government care abruptly at age 19, losing their connections to foster parents, transition workers, psychologists and other caregivers.

Michele Kambolis, a Vancouver clinical counsellor and director of Harbourside Family Counseling Centre, works with many youth in government care.

“We know that children who have been traumatized and who have had attachment trauma need more support in order to build the necessary life skills,” Kambolis says. “These youth need more time and more support to ready themselves for the level of independence that’s required.”

The statistics are alarming, but remarkably consistent.

Sixty-five per cent of youth in care have been diagnosed with a mental health issue at least once in childhood, the Vancouver Foundation report Fostering Change says.

A B.C. government report says two-thirds of the 46 per cent of former kids in care who access Income Assistance in B.C. qualify for the “persons with disabilities” supplement to income assistance. The government says it doesn’t track why so many former foster kids qualify for this supplement.

A report by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth, shows that more than 51 per cent of children in care were identified by the Ministry of Education as having special needs, compared with 8.4 per cent of children who had never been in care. The report says most of those special needs are related to intensive behavioural or serious mental health issues.

Victoria researcher Deborah Rutman found that mental health issues including depression were reported by 57 per cent of the former kids in care who participated in her three-year longitudinal study of 37 youth who had aged out of care in B.C.

These statistics don’t surprise Kambolis, who says it is a complex array of factors that contribute to the higher rate of mental health issues for kids in and from government care.

“The biological parents of kids in care often have mental health issues themselves at a rate of about 27 per cent, which means kids in care are at higher risk genetically and due to environmental factors,” Kambolis said. “Another contributor to the higher risk of mental health problems is having witnessed domestic violence. Almost half of parents whose kids are in care have experienced domestic abuse, which increases the mental health risk for their kids.

“Forty per cent of biological parents of kids in care have abused alcohol or drugs, and in most cases those children were severely neglected and lacked consistent healthy attachments. All of those factors together vastly increase their risk for mental illness. It’s a whole cycle of neglect and abuse that is often multi-generational.”

And that multi-generational effect doesn’t appear to be slowing down. More than half of the participants in Rutman’s study became parents themselves over the three-year period. Kambolis said that is likely because of their lack of healthy relationships.

“Children in care have always longed for family, so having children early fulfils their wish in a way that they are not ready for,” Kambolis said. “We know that children who have attachment trauma will attach really quickly in relationships. Because they have such a strong core need to be loved, they’ll often commit to unhealthy or even abusive relationships or have children before they’re ready.”

If a youth in care is seeing someone for their mental health issues, when they turn 19, they will have to find another caregiver. That loss is just one of many for kids aging out of government care.

“Most youth will describe that they’re literally cut off when they turn 19,” Kambolis said. “What I see is that everything changes — where they live, the support professionals they’ve come to rely on, the foster parents that become the attachment figures that they so critically need to be mentally and emotionally healthy may or may not continue to be in their lives. And this massive team of support that they’ve had that might include psychiatrists, one-to-one workers, interventionists and of course social workers are no longer available to them.

“In what world does a normal child have all of their support systems pulled out at once?”

Losing all of these supports at once reinforces “attachment trauma” that most kids in government care have experienced because they have lost the secure connection to their parents.

Kambolis said because attachment is so important, the connections that kids do have should not be taken away all at once.

“Providing long-term supports — or at least only pulling them out one at a time and replacing them with other long-term supports of a different variety — would give them a better chance,” Kambolis said.

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Cutting off care abruptly adds to teens’ troubles

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